Netizens falling for clickbait: report

Click on this unbelievable video… You won’t believe what happens next… Like this to see Robin Williams’ goodbye video to the world.

Indians, in particular, seem to go gaga for clickbait videos and articles which have pervaded social media. The country ranks second in the world when it comes to falling for social media scams, said the Internet Security Threat Report brought out by software security company Symantec, which analyses millions of attacks through 2014. Nearly 6.23 per cent of the victims of all social media scams are from India, which is second behind the United States which has a whopping 30.22 per cent of all worldwide attacks.

Tarun Kaura, Director of Technology Sales (India) for the company, describes the

modus operandi of the ‘manual sharing’ that constitutes four out of five social media attacks: “On clicking, they force you to ‘like’ the video. This adds to the scam becoming viral, and getting your friends to click on it too. Then they direct you to a survey to make it seem more authentic. Eventually, they ask you to download malware — in the guise of a software update — that will steal data.”

The 20th edition of the report shows India climbing the charts in numerous categories. In terms of bot infections (Internet-connected software that relays information about an individual’s system to the hacker), India has leapfrogged five positions since 2013 to rank 16 in the world.

India becomes the top source of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, which makes the infected machine slower and cripples its Internet systems. With over 60,000 “ransom-ware” attacks — a type of digital extortion where the hacker disables your system until a payment is given — detected yearly in the country, India finds itself in the third place in Asia. One-thirds of all attacks in India are targeted at small businesses; with a majority of attacks — 65 per cent — concentrated in major metros, including Bengaluru.